Dive Brief:
- A class-action lawsuit against IXL Learning is moving forward after a federal judge in early November denied the ed tech platform’s motions to compel arbitration and dismiss without prejudice.
- The lawsuit, which was filed in May by several parents in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, claims IXL Learning collected and monetized the data of millions of school-age children without parental consent, violating the Federal Wiretap Act and other state laws.
- IXL Learning did not respond to a request for comment. The plaintiffs in Shanahan v. IXL Learning, Inc. have requested monetary damages, which would be determined at trial, in addition to injunctive relief “as appropriate.”
Dive Insight:
The plaintiffs, whose children attend two public school districts in Kansas that use IXL products, allege that “IXL’s massive data-harvesting apparatus exposes parents and school-aged children to serious and irreversible risks to their privacy, property, and autonomy, and harms them in ways that are often invisible but always profound.”
More than 16 million students nationwide use the IXL Learning platform, according to the company. IXL offers personalized online learning, instructional resources and data analytics services for school districts.
Following the complaint, IXL moved to compel arbitration because the company said the school districts involved agreed to arbitration, which includes all parents of enrolled students.
But in Judge Rita Lin’s order, she wrote that “neither the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (‘COPPA’) nor common-law agency principles support IXL’s contention that school districts act as agents of parents when contracting with educational vendors.”
IXL Learning has the right to immediately appeal Lin’s order, which may take some time to resolve in the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, said Julie Liddell, who is representing the plaintiffs and is founding attorney of the Ed Tech Law Center. If IXL appeals and the 9th Circuit Court agrees with the plaintiffs, the litigation against IXL Learning will continue.
Liddell said she has previously tried other ways to generally address student data privacy challenges.
“The litigation was really sort of a last resort of, well, we haven’t been able to do this with lawmakers, and we haven’t been able to get the federal agencies to really oversee this stuff,” Liddell said. “So let’s give the courts a chance to weigh in.”
The Ed Tech Law Center is also representing plaintiffs in a similar class-action lawsuit against PowerSchool, an ed tech company that offers software to school districts aiming to improve student outcomes.
Liddell added that these types of lawsuits are “the first of many cases to come.”
“We are hopeful that we can force change through the court saying that … this kind of surveillance data collection business model, it’s not okay in the context of compulsory education,” Liddell said.
If the courts rule against those business models, she said, it will then allow ed tech tools to focus solely on educating students rather than relying on the “ulterior motive of data collection.”
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